When to Use the Spanish Pluperfect and Preterit Perfect Tenses

The pluperfect and preterit tenses in Spanish have identical translations in English. Go figure! So what’s the difference between the pluperfect and preterit tenses? The differences center less on conceptual distinctions and more on the contexts in which they’re used:

Pluperfect: The pluperfect is conversational and is used in everyday speech to describe a past action that happened prior to another past action. The more recent past action typically signals the end of the previous past action, as in the following examples: